


Sun Sepulchre

by jerseydevious



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Time Travel, but when i was the only thing i wanted, go on a murder roadtrip to go kill your pal friendpatine, i haven't been actively interested in star wars for 50 years, so i just decided to go ahead and write the start of it for fun, was a time travel fic where vader and post-jedi ahsoka
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-23
Updated: 2020-12-28
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:14:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,947
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28248945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jerseydevious/pseuds/jerseydevious
Summary: Ahsoka Tano left the Jedi Order after being falsely accused, but while on the run from Separatist forces intent on killing her, she meets an unknown Sith Lord who wants to hunt down Darth Sidious for his own reasons—and as they say, the enemy of your enemy is your friend.Or, that time Darth Vader managed to rope his ex-apprentice into a Sith-murdering roadtrip, and it was weird for pretty much everyone involved.
Relationships: Anakin Skywalker & Ahsoka Tano, Sheev Palpatine & Anakin Skywalker
Comments: 106
Kudos: 448





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hi guys. I watched some of The Mandalorian and now I have strong Star Wars feelings, and I love time travel fics - cheesy as they may be sometimes - but the specific one I always wanted was just a janky galactic roadtrip where Vader just murks Palpatine with baby Ahsoka. So I wrote the beginning of that fic because I felt like it, and decided I'd throw the first two parts of the fic up, see the response, see if I was still in a Star Wars mood, and then decide whether I want to finish it or not. So here's the part one, I'll post the second bit later, and we'll see how it goes.

It could have been a better day.

Tatooine had, as far as Ahsoka could tell, only the one season—brutally, furiously hot, with both suns scorching the sands and the air and the world and everything that dared to live on the surface. She hadn’t intended to land on Tatooine, either, but the freighter she’d stowed away on had a coolant leak and the ship had to be landed at the nearest planet, and in the Outer Rim the pickings were slim and pilots landed on the first available plot of land there was. It was her luck that the first available plot of land there was ended up being Tatooine, of all the hellish places, and she didn’t have the clothing for the binary suns boiling the world from every possible angle, so she had hunkered down in an alleyway until she could steal a coarse sheet off a line and wrap it around her _lekku._ Ahsoka couldn’t say the heat bothered her, because, for one thing, she’d been shuffled from battleground to battleground for years now—there was nothing, climate-wise, that could bother her. She’d fought in the rain and the mud and in the buffeting walls of heat. More than that, she’d roomed with Anakin on a good deal of those missions, and Anakin’s favorite way to set a tempstat was as high as it could feasibly go and then throw a blanket on top of that. She’d adjusted, because if she ever asked him to lower the temperature, he’d glare at her like it was a personal insult to him. The sun itself was the real problem, rather than its heat, because the radiation would cause her skin to boil and bubble, and if she didn’t get off of Tatooine soon the skin over her _lekku_ would dry out and itchy and inflamed, which was irritating, and she wanted to avoid it at all costs. So she’d hunkered down, avoided the suns as much as she could, and kept her stolen sheet tied over her head and her lightsabers hidden beneath her canvas cloak. She slipped something here and there from the food stalls, won a few canteens of water in dejarik games at the cantina, and got a general sense of where she needed to be headed—she was just south of Mos Espa, and she’d have her best shot at getting off this dustball at Mos Espa, because that was practically the only place anyone coming into Tatooine or leaving Tatooine wanted to go. She could make it on foot, if she walked through the night. If she could keep her head about her and not get lost—everything in Tatooine looked like everything else in Tatooine, sand-blasted and a dusky yellow-orange, and anyone who got lost on Tatooine died on Tatooine.

It could have been a better day, all things said and done, but because the night after it was so phenomenally terrible, Ahsoka thought she’d rather go back to where the sun was blazing hot above her and she was slouching from shade to shade to avoid the radiation burns. At least, then, there was eopie jerky hanging in the foodstalls that she could swipe pieces of.

“So we’re going to Mos Espa,” Ahsoka said, for possibly the third time. They weren’t inclined to answer her, but if they were pushing her along to Mos Espa, Ahsoka thought that maybe the best course would be to let them lead her practically to the doorstep before getting away. They were native to the planet, they had the Tatoo accent that Anakin sometimes slipped into when he was tired—they would know the way better than she ever would.

“She’s not supposed to talk,” one of the hunters said. “She’s supposed to be terrified.”

“You’re not very scary, sorry to say.”

The other hunter, his cloak a darker brown than his colleague’s, said, “I don’t care what she’s supposed to be, she’s—you know, what’s it called?”

“Togruta, I thought,” his partner supplied.

Ahsoka shifted her hands. She wasn’t even shackled, just tied up with a bit of coarse twine, like the kind they made bantha halters out of. Maybe a week ago, maybe three weeks ago, they wouldn’t have gotten the drop on her. She could have sensed them through the Force a mile away, if she’d focused. But three weeks ago her clothes didn’t drape off of her and there wasn’t a healing wound from a blaster bolt in her side and she could think in a straight line, could breathe without shuddering. 

“Togruta!” the darker cloak said. “Togruta, they got the—the horns, you know. I hear that makes a girl more expensive, in Mos Espa, you don’t see a lot of them around here.”

“They’re called _lekku,”_ Ahsoka said, mildly.

“I don’t really care,” the darker cloak snapped. “And you ought to be quiet. You ought to be quiet and grateful that we’re here with you, don’t you know there’s dragons all through these parts?”

His partner nodded furiously. “All through these parts. A whole mess of ‘em. Raiders are out here every day leavin’ sacrifices, hoping the big dragons don’t come for them.”

“I don’t think the big dragons are out hunting one person,” Ahsoka said, with a hint of mischief. “That’s a waste of energy. Three people, though, that’s just enough to attract one.”

The crunching of sand beneath the hunters’ boots fell silent, and the lukewarm press of a blaster between shoulderblades stopped. She forced herself to halt. “Mar,” the hunter behind her, in the lighter cloak, said. “Mar, what if she’s—you know, isn’t everyone who gets got out here usually in big parties? Mar, what if—”

“Shut it, Ve, and keep moving,” the other barked. If Ahsoka had the energy, she’d prod deeper at their minds, see what she could glean—she sensed they were close, possibly related, possibly cousins—but she was so hungry still that her bones ached with it, and all the heat and sweat of the day, without the spare water to clean the wound on her side, was probably leading her directly to a nasty infection. Sometimes charities from the Core Worlds brought medical supplies and other things to the Outer Rim, and almost always some prominent family, senators or lords or monarchs, would wave to beaming crowds as they espoused about the tragic state of the Outer Rim. If luck was by her side, if the Force was with her, there’d be one in Mos Espa now that would never miss a few bacta pads and canteens of clean water. Anakin had always hated gestures like that for whatever reason, but it was beyond Ahsoka—in her opinion, something was better than nothing, but Anakin was prickly by nature and everything got under his skin. She needed to try to stop thinking of Anakin. Ever since landing on Tatooine, her old master was everywhere, in everything, every shadow—maybe it was fever, maybe it was dehydration, but sometimes Ahsoka thought she could even feel his presence through the Force. She wanted to reach for it. He was one half of the home she missed.

The end of Ve’s blaster stabbed her again in the back and the sand crunched beneath his heels and they pressed forward again. Ahsoka’s luck had run thin months ago.

“Just be grateful, girl,” Mar said. “I’d rather a good steady job in Jabba’s palace than to get ripped apart by one of those beasties. Any day.”

_A steady job is a funny thing to call it,_ Ahsoka thought, but at best she was mildly annoyed. She wasn’t particularly worried. As long as they didn’t recognize her face, as long as she didn’t light up her lightsabers, as long as word never got out to anyone that a former Jedi had taken up brief residence on Tatooine, she could survive. What she couldn’t survive were the assassin droids marked with the symbol of the Confederacy, the droid squadrons that had chased her from the Core outwards, until she’d found a freighter destined for precisely the middle of galactic nowhere. She couldn’t survive sleeping for an hour or two and then bolting to get to the nearest port, over and over. The chances anyone on Tatooine would recognize her were low, but they got higher, the closer to Jabba’s palace she got—she needed to be in, and then out, quiet as a ghost.

Ahsoka fell silent. Mar and Ve occasionally exchanged tense whispers, but Ahsoka ignored them—when they were closer to Mos Espa, she would dispatch them. When they were closer, and she’d centered herself, spent an hour or two drawing the power of the Force around her and letting it slide in through her faults, she would dispatch them. When the Force had steadied her hands. The three months on her own since leaving the Jedi Order hadn’t all been miserable; she’d been escorted off of Coruscant to Naboo by the grace of Senator Amidala, and Senator Amidala had even offered her lodging somewhere quiet, in one of Naboo’s agricultural belts. Ahsoka had stayed long enough, enjoyed it, before the Separatists had managed to get a bead on her position and send a quiet group of bounty hunters after her—to what end, Ahsoka couldn’t fathom. As far as she could tell, everything they’d done, every move they made, had been for her head—they didn’t want her information, they didn’t want her secrets, they just wanted her dead. Almost desperately, the way they sent barrage after barrage of bounty hunters and assassin droids after her, but what about her was worth the expenditure? 

She was too tired to think.

They made their way through the rocky crags and across the dunes, the temperature plummeting lower as the sand raced to let go of the heat the suns had pressed into them throughout the day. The dark, purplish color of the night became a deep navy blue, and the world was lit only by Tatooine’s three moons. Anakin had told her all their names, once, and a few of their stories, but now Ahsoka could only remember that the largest was called Ghomrassen, and the legends of Tatooine’s moons had something to do with dragon eyes, as a lot of legends on Tatooine did. To live on Tatooine, she thought, might be to love the dragons you lived with, because there was really nothing else to be done but fear them. The further along they followed the trail—marked, occasionally, by green paint on the rocks, although there were plenty opportunities to get lost—the more outside details she became aware of. A familiar pattern of footprints in sand, familiar winks of scrap metal, familiar noises drowned out by the sand and wind. Her luck, as it seemed, had drained itself dry, and then some.

“Why are there Separatist droids all the way out here?” she asked, quietly. Her boot landed squarely in the middle of a rigid battledroid footprint.

“Separatist?” Mar asked, head tilted. “They’re security droids. Some mining operation, I don’t know.”

_If I duck my head,_ Ahsoka thought. But she was between the droids and the sands, out here; she couldn’t be certain of her way without a guide even on the trail, much less off it. Getting lost in this section of the desert—or any section of Tatooine’s desert—was certain death, whether by dehydration or predation, but there was a chance of survival even if the droids did clock her—and with her facial markings, she was distinctive enough that any droid’s facial recognition system could catch her in an instant. She would have to hope the Force would be enough.

It could have been a better night.

Whatever operation the Separatists were running on Tatooine—the fact that they were on Tatooine at all, no doubt with Jabba’s knowledge, was interesting in and of itself—they’d set up a droid outpost on the trail, manned by goldenrods, as Obi-Wan sometimes called them when he was annoyed. Ahsoka had no idea how that was supposed to be an insult, but Obi-Wan had a habit of stating things that were facts as if they were insults. For a second, she missed him so much she could barely breathe.

“Halt,” a droid ordered. 

“Oh, brother,” Ve said. “We’re walkin’ with merchandise here, you don’t own this road, what do you want?”

_Whatever this is, it’s not nearly a road,_ Ahsoka thought.

“Your faces will be scanned according to routine security protocol,” the droid said, positioning itself in the center of the path. “This is a requirement in order to pass.”

“I hate these things,” Ve said. “Mar, do you—”

“Whatever registry they put our faces, they’ll have to put everyone in Mos Espa on it,” Mar said. “Can’t hurt, I suppose.”

The other droids in the outpost had their blasters at the ready. Mar and Ve moved on either side of her, and for the first time in hours, the space between her shoulderblades was absent the weight of a blaster. The best move for Ahsoka to make would be to use what little surprise she had, kill the droid just as it started to scan her, and then duck behind Ve, let him take the bolts coming from the droids while she ducked behind the stone edge of the outpost for cover, work from there. _Be less spontaneous,_ Obi-Wan used to tell her. _We’ve enough to deal with when Anakin goes running off, we can’t have two of you. At least tell me, before you do something stupid._

A bright red light and a tinny humming noise erupted beside her as Ve’s face was scanned—it took too long for comfort, and then the light flickered off, and the droid wordlessly stepped in front of Ahsoka. She wrapped her lightsaber in her hand and in seconds the brilliant yellow erupted through its chest and the processor behind it fizzled and smelted under the heat. The hunters, the two of them, shouted, and Ahsoka dove beneath Ve while the battledroids opened fire, and tumbled behind the stone outpost parapet, chest heaving—she shouldn’t have been breathing hard. This should have been easy. Her muscles and tendons shouldn’t feel unstrung by a mere moment’s work.

There was a smoking crater in Ve’s chest, now, that she could hear Mar screaming over; she had seconds before the idiotic mouth-breather came directly for her, at the same time the battledroids rounded the corner. She didn’t have time for anything messy—without a doubt, the battledroids had already sent a distress signal, and reinforcements were steadily marching from wherever they congregated. She hoped it was far, but it wasn’t likely—what the droid armies lacked in technical skill, they more than made up for in quantity. There were a lot of shortcomings the Separatists had, but raw material and manpower was far from one of them; the Jedi had never been able to crack the Separatist supply chain, never able to stem the flow of endless, endless battledroids, never able to produce enough biological clones to keep up with them. The tide was ceaseless.

She ignited her green lightsaber and leaned the blade back next to her face, blocking a blaster bolt from a droid who’d rounded the corner, and then used what power she had left to yank the droid down by its ankle. It was a jerky, childish motion, not fit for a youngling in the creche, something Anakin—who was rather fond of blunt Force maneuvers anyway, if she were honest—would have raised an eyebrow at her for. Something Obi-Wan might have outright disapproved of her for. But her vision was gray at the edges, now, and the day was long, the night was longer, and she slashed her lightsaber outwards and cleaved the droid unevenly in half without losing her position. Like she’d thought, there was Mar, stalking towards her with his hands fisted at his sides and his face contorted in fury; she’d sensed closeness between the two of them, but now she was realizing they were closer than she’d assumed, closer than cousins. Brothers, most likely.

The Force pulled at her, murmuring _around the front,_ and Ahsoka skittered to the other side, behind the outpost. The sand she’d been crouching in moments before was turned to glass by a flurry of blaster bolts. She pressed her back against the swing door that led into the inside of the outpost and folded herself beneath one of the crooked wooden desks—they weren’t much cover, but they were something, and her head was spinning. She’d miscalculated, though—as often as she’d fought battledroids, she’d never seen them climb over anything if it could be avoided, even if it was clearly the smarter maneuver. Whatever programming fault that had been, it’d been eliminated in these models, because one droid crawled jerkily over the parapet and trained its blaster on her. Ahsoka crossed her lightsabers in front of her, and they trembled with the weakness in her arms, and she deflected one bolt, two, and then the droid grabbed her by the ankle and she sliced through its arm. Clearly it had thought about the maneuver, because its partner had been prepared, and caught her in the shoulder with a bolt before she could swing her other saber around quickly enough to deflect it. The opposite blade ended up decapitating the droid leaning over her, and then, on a whim, threw her yellow lightsaber end-over-end until it barreled through the farther firing droid like the metal was sweet air. The droid hit the sand, and then the lightsaber skittered over the path. _Behind you,_ the Force murmured, and then Ahsoka buried her saber hilt-deep into the chest of her last errant captor, and he slumped to the packed stone with a dull thud, dull-eyed and the hole in his chest smoking in fine tendrils that curled upwards.

In the quiet she stretched out her senses, but without beating hearts, battledroids made no signal in the Force. She could hear a steady march, metal clanking and their high-pitched, grating vocoders rattling in the wind, but how close, around the roaring in her ears? Impossible, because her shoulder blazed with pain, and her side ached with duller, older pain, and she’d been trying to outrun these miserable rustbuckets for weeks now. Nonstop, they found her, whether by assassin droid or hapless battledroid platoon or heedless bounty hunter—if she stopped for more than a night, she’d be dead by morning. She kept a commlink hooked to her belt. Anakin would find her, if she asked, would come and find her, or her corpse. She was so tired of running. She was going to have to make a break for it—there was no way she’d be able to take down a whole platoon, there was nowhere to hide and no one to back her up, and she just had to pray the Force was with her. _Carry me,_ she thought to it, and realistically she knew that she had no power left to reach into, but she liked to believe it shifted, then. 

She slid awkwardly over the parapet and took off, crouching low to scoop her other lightsaber out of the sand. The ground behind her erupted in blasterfire—they were closer than Ahsoka had assumed. She was more out of it than she’d thought, the thrumming of her pulse too loud, too constant. She ran in a serpentine path, trying to throw off their aim, but as she was hitting the crest of the dip beside the path, a stray bolt caught her in the ankle—it didn’t burn through the leather but it was enough to throw her off her mid-stride balance, and she tumbled down the side. Several droids followed her, sliding down in a controlled descent, and she had a few seconds before they were steady enough to fire their blasters again, but the world was black anyway. She’d never see it coming. 

The blackness took a long, even, automated breath, and Ahsoka thought to herself that it’d be really clever of her to run into a new murderer, while escaping several others and a pair of slavers. A lightsaber hissed as it was ignited, and a furious red blade hummed inches in front of her face, and Ahsoka thought that maybe they’d have to make a whole new word for how unlucky she was, to outrun slavers and run into enemy soliders and then run into one of the handful of Sith Lords that lived in the entire galaxy. _I hate Tatooine,_ she thought.

There was another long, even, automated breath, and then the blackness said, “I have a message. Which of you will choose to bear it.” His voice was as automated as his breathing, deep and artificially loud, but crisp. Carefully articulated. 

The battledroids opened fire, and Ahsoka rolled out of the Sith’s death march forward as he deflected both bolts back at the droids who had fired them, sending them both crumpling to the ground. The rest of the droid platoon tumbled down the side of the dune, and the Sith—tall, too tall and too broad, if she tried to block a blow from him it might snap her wrist, he would have size and strength on her for sure—stepped over the smoking remains, the pristine, if a bit dusty, edge of a black cloak dragging over them. Whatever battle followed, Ahsoka couldn’t follow it, between her pulse in her ears and the effort it took her just to stand, the effort it took just to ignite her sabers and shift into whatever poor mockery of a battle stance she could manage. If she were to die, if the Force were to call her home, she would die fighting. _I’m sorry, Master,_ she thought.

The Sith twisted to her, and she saw in the moonlight that he wore a mask with bulbous, red-tinted eyes, like a ghostly skull. A blaster bolt glanced over his helmet and he didn’t seem to feel it, as focused as he was on her, and then it hit her like a speeder going full-tilt; he’d been smothering his presence in the Force, before, but then, for that instant, every wall he had slipped downwards. She could taste ash in her mouth and every breath filled her lungs with ice—if a sun could freeze, if all of its power could be redirected in tunnels of ice and ash, it would feel like that moment, the infinite instant where she glanced into an abyss of dull and endless hate and it crushed her windpipe to see. _Is that nothing, is that what it is to have nothing,_ she thought, wildly, and then it was gone, and the droids were slaughtered, save for one that was scrambling desperately out of the Dark Lord’s shadow.

“So it is you who will see my message delivered,” the Sith rumbled. “Who is your superior?”

“Unit K-3878,” the droid answered. Its vocoder was steady, even as it cowered beneath the Sith. Ahsoka had always envied that, the steadiness of machinery. Anakin’s prosthetic hand couldn’t shake. 

“You will tell Unit K-3878 to pass this message to their superior, and so forth, until it reaches my intended destination,” the Sith said. “You will tell Darth Sidious that I am coming for him, and that there is nowhere in this galaxy or the next that he will be safe from me. Tell him that I know pain, and because I am kind, I will share my knowledge of it with him.”

“I will deliver this message to Unit K-3878,” the droid answered. 

The Sith flicked his hand. “Be gone. Return and I will turn you and your base to rubble. If Darth Sidious is not safe from me, imagine what I will do to _you.”_

The droid nodded, gears in its neck clicking, and then stood, and after a moment’s hesitation, bolted off into the desert.

Ahsoka sucked in a deep breath. The Sith watched the droid disappear in a cloud of orange sand, hands folded primly behind his back. It was a curious image, a Sith standing almost elegantly in the middle of his own circle of smoking carnage. Ahsoka could look at him clearly, now; he was tall and broad and looked about as easy to knock over as one of Coruscant’s towering skyscrapers, sure, but some of that size had to be armor, given that his cloak looked like heavy armorweave. His breathing was incessant and devilishly loud through the grate of his death-mask, and he was still holding his lightsaber, but his grip and his black leather glove obscured its build. She didn’t need to see the hilt to know it was built for endurance, built to withstand blunt force, because it would have to be.

“Can we skip to the part where I hold a lightsaber to your throat and you tell me who and where this Darth Sidious is,” Ahsoka snarled.

“We can skip to the latter without the former,” the Sith said. “Your presence is evidence enough. Follow me.”

Abruptly, the Sith turned on his heel, and his lightsaber fizzled out. He hooked it again on his belt, and now that he’d turned she could see some amount of flickering lights installed in an apparatus on his chest, but he stalked past her too quickly for her to analyze what it really was. 

“I’m not following you,” she hissed, but she was somewhat dumbfounded. A Sith had never turned down killing a Jedi before.

The Sith stopped in the sand a few feet in front of her—his stride was long, and he minced no motion—and said, without turning an inch, “Follow. You would do well to keep pace. There are dragons with us.”

“That’d be nice, if I were following you,” Ahsoka said. “But I’m not, actually, and you’re going to tell me who and where Darth Sidious is, so I can kill him after I kill you.”

The Sith turned his head, just slightly, over his shoulder. The moonlight bounced off of the metal of his helmet, giving him an eerie, gruesome look. Ahsoka thought that there probably wasn’t an angle or lighting that existed that he didn’t look eerie and gruesome in. “A Jedi is supposed to be humble,” he said, and his bleak amusement rippled through the Force. “Your belief that you can kill me is the farthest thing from it.”

“I’m not a Jedi.”

“That is a point in your favor,” the Sith said. “I have killed many Jedi. Consider yourself lucky. Now you will follow, and stop testing my patience.”

Ahsoka did the only thing she could think to do, which was to dart forward take a swing at his back. He blocked her from behind, and then pushed her backwards with a flick of the blade. He twisted with a flare of his cape, and then the red lightsaber buzzed close to her throat—he had reach on her, it was clear, because if she held her saber up straight she wouldn’t be close enough to make a threat. 

“You should reconsider this course of action,” the Sith said. “You are not as spontaneous as you think. You have no advantage. Drop your weapons, and give them to me.”

Ahsoka ground her teeth, and deactivated her sabers, dropping them to the sand. The Dark Side swirled around her, and the lightsabers rose forward and hooked themselves to the Sith’s belt.

“I’m going to kill you,” Ahsoka swore.

The Sith inclined his head. “We all have dreams, child.”

Then she was being marched through the desert for the second time that night, this time with the barrel of a Sith’s lightsaber pressed between her shoulderblades. It could have been a better day, but it couldn’t have been a worse night.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ahsoka is somewhat kidnapped by a Sith Lord, who decides it's normal and appropriate to pitch a teenage former Jedi padawan something that's equivalent to an internship, if you wanted a career in murdering political leaders.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So here's the second part, which I was just gonna post, and see if I wanted to do a full thing from here. I do know that I absolutely just wanted to write the insanity of the first part, because it would be insane, to be Ahsoka Tano and then you're accosted by a dude that sounds like an evil washing machine.

They didn’t have far to walk, thankfully—Ahsoka’s legs were starting to give beneath her, the tendons popping and trembling. If the Sith noticed, he offered no snide commentary, but also no concessions. His pace was brutally fast, and it was most of what she had just to press forward before he trampled her. She wasn’t sure where they were going until a gaping mouth of a cave yawned in front of her, nestled between the dunes so as to blend easily into the landscape, sand buffeted upwards by the wind blowing orange clouds in front of it. Long, vicious scours pockmarked the rocky edge, in some places several inches deep, ominous and in some places with wicked sharp edges.

“Tell me this is an abandoned mining shaft,” Ahsoka said.

“The dragon will not bother us,” the Sith said, evenly. “The female Greater Krayt attends her den less often in this season. And as it were, I have informed her of my presence.”

_I have no clue what that means and I really don_ _’t want to know more,_ Ahsoka thought. “Tatooine has the one season.”

“Incorrect. The nights draw shorter for half of the year, in the Northern hemisphere. This is what you would perhaps call summertime, on Coruscant.”

Ahsoka snorted—Coruscant’s climate-controlled environment meant there was no such thing as unpleasant skies, much less a genuine summertime of sweat and heat—and then the Sith shoved her forward, closer to the cave’s shadow. Red light bathed the ground in a flash, and a hiss, and then his lightsaber crackled ominously in the air behind her, throwing her shadow out in front of her longer than she was tall. Every inch of her body tensed.

“I would not bring you here to kill you,” the Sith said, derisively. “That would be a waste of time. The cave is dark, if you were not aware. Walk _forward._ _”_

Ahsoka crept slowly into the cave, expecting more wetness on the walls than there was, but of course moisture was a rare enough thing on Tatooine. Every other cave in the galaxy coveted its moisture. Tatooine offered dry-as-bones sand and dust that flooded her lungs. The lightsaber, to her chagrin, helped light the way, although the red blended in far too easily with the sand—her own lightsabers would have been far more helpful, and maybe she’d feel less like she was crawling to her slow and miserable death, if her shadow wasn’t cast in red. The floor of the entrance was thick with sand, and then the sand led into a steep drop until it met with the sandstone cavern floor, and every step they took echoed far into the distance. The Sith’s steps, particularly, because between his rhythmic breathing and the shuffle of armorweave, creak of leather, the whir and click of machinery, he moved with his own orchestra of sound. Oddly enough, for all that was draped over him—and who honestly wore an elaborate set of what was clearly battle armor to the hottest planet in the known galaxy?—he was sure-footed over the sand, and even more sure-footed over the rock. He’d clearly been on Tatooine long enough to know how to navigate it. She’d hoped he would slow down, but slow, apparently, was not a setting he had.

“How big are these things,” Ahsoka said, peering into the inky black ceiling, no doubt leagues above her head.

“They are,” the Sith said, slowly, “a curiosity. The females are larger than the males, and they have ten legs to distribute their weight over the sand. They dwarf some of the largest herbivores in the galaxy, and look like something from Mon Cala’s seas. They are bigger than you can imagine and survive on a planet where next to nothing can live. To the left.”

“The left?”

The Sith’s vocoder rattled, and his annoyance was so strong through the Force, Ahsoka could taste it, like the sour candies Obi-Wan always saved for her, the ones she used to split with Rex when they had a spare moment. He grabbed her by the shoulder and shoved her to the left, and she stumbled over a sudden incline in the sandstone, and then picked her way through the dark, the Sith’s pace be damned. He slowed to accomodate her, but now and then he’d just shove her forward, as if he were barely keeping his patience together. There was the steady rise of the sandstone, the sudden reflection of red light on the ceiling she could see again, after a while. As much as she was beginning to be unnerved by the way the vocoder spoke in the quiet, she hated his breathing more—ruthlessly the same, even, equal breaths. She panted, in the heat, and the increasingly musky smell, and he remained steadfast.

“They are burrowers. Their young often practice their skills by burrowing through their own birthing den, creating the series of caves in Tatooine’s surface that the Jawas towards the south live in to survive. Stop here. The tunnel is not stable further on.”

Ahsoka stopped, and turned. The Sith could stand comfortably, but the top of his helmet was within a foot of the ceiling—on equal, solid footing, he was even taller. The shadows seemed to leap at him, too, lend themselves to him. A massive, dusty, off-white shard of—eggshell?—was pressed against the wall, near glowing in the din, and near it, there was a contraption that the Sith bent to fiddle with. It was agonizing fiddling, at that, because for all his grace plowing through the sand he had no dexterity in his hands, thanks to what looked in the red light to be reinforced leather gloves. Finally a gear ticked and then a bulb she hadn’t seen in the dark winked to life, filling the cavern with dusky orange light, and his lightsaber was deactivated and replaced on his belt. He didn’t look less gruesome in orange. At least it felt less like the color of her blood, spilling across the sandstone.

“Well,” Ahsoka said. “It’s quiet, as far as places to live go. I’m not sure I like the roommates.”

There was a long beat where he stared at her, nothing between them but the utter, complete silence of the world around them, and his raucous breathing crashing through it. “If you fall over because you were too stubborn to sit, I will leave you for the anooba,” he said, sharply. “You will have deserved it.”

Ahsoka stared. The Sith’s emotionless lenses glared back at her dispassionately, and then his hand hovered over his lightsaber, in a clear threat. _He_ _’ll kill me if I don’t sit down,_ she thought, incredulously, and she side-stepped to the krayt eggshell and then folded herself on top of the curve of it. _I think I_ _’m hallucinating._

“Your presence here is unique,” the Sith said. His hands had settled on his belt, now, and the orange light brought out the low red hues of the lenses he looked through, making them appear bloodsoaked. “It is a sign, even moreso than my own presence. The Force has demanded action. It has demanded retribution. You and I have a common enemy.”

“I really don’t think we do,” she said.

“Quiet,” he barked. “You were once a Jedi, Ahsoka Tano. You were taught the same lessons as every Jedi. You want to hunt the Sith Lords down and have their hide as all Jedi do.”

She’d hoped, originally, that the Republic would be able to keep her decommissioning as commander of the 501st quiet—she hated the way he emphasized once a Jedi, the calm way of it. It implied he knew more about why she’d left the Order than the just the simple fact that she had left. For a Sith she’d never seen, that no one had ever heard of, he knew a disturbing amount about internal, private affairs.

“Which is why I can’t figure out why you’d bring me to where you sleep,” Ahsoka said, mildly. She picked at a loose thread on her cloak. “Isn’t that a terrible idea, tactically speaking?”

The Sith was silent for a long moment. “The fact that you repeatedly seem to believe you could best me in battle is an insult. Do not get too excited, child. I do not sleep,” he said.

“You’re a bit cocky, aren’t you, for a guy who is wearing full battle armor for no reason,” she said. If she could get him angry enough, he might let slip a weakness she could take advantage of, the second she could feel the comfortable weight of her lightsabers in hand. A lot of the exact knowledge of how the Sith worked, how they operated, the poisonous ways they carved the Force, was stored in the Temple’s restricted section, restricted to the council and who the council offered entrance. She didn’t know if the Sith could actually avoid sleeping. She didn’t know the beast in front of her, but she didn’t think it likely that he’d bluff.

It worked, too; she could feel it, the icy fire of his fury. The air around her frosted as the temperature plummeted. He was inelegant with regards to shielding, inelegant about the finer ways of the Force as it existed in the mind, but he deliberately showed her an image burned into him; blood, spattered on a wall, leather-clad thumbs skittering close to a man’s fear-wide eyes, all doused in a thick haze of red and flashing overlays. _I know pain, and because I am kind,_ he had said. The space behind her eyes throbbed with a stabbing pain.

“This is no armor,” he said, finally. “This is myself. I was remade.”

“Dramatic,” she said, smirking half-heartedly, but the way he said _remade_ resonated behind her sternum. There was something there that she wasn’t quite getting, something deeper. There was something _wrong_ to all of this, like the Force was pushing the skin on her montrals backwards—some deep undercurrent of unnatural.

The Sith folded his hands behind his back, and then turned in a sharp, jerky motion. His cape flared out and snapped at his heels, and then he turned again just as sharp, pacing like a caged gundark. “I want my Master dead. I wish to parade his carcass on a pike. I will destroy him until he is unmemorable, until he is nothing but another piece of bloody refuse in the lowest levels of the city planet. I will take what he has made and lay waste to it.”

“Your master,” Ahsoka said. “Being Darth Sidious.”  
  


The Sith stopped, with a rattle of metal-on-metal, likely from the large chestplate connecting with one of the shoulder pieces. “Yes,” he said. The Force rippled with the intensity of that word, and if there was one thing Ahsoka was beginning to understand about this character she’d happened upon, it was that he did everything wholly, with whatever he had. He was an absolute even in his one-word answers.

The deathly mask regarded her for a long moment, silently, the cold fire of his presence itself slithering around her. It was almost unbearable how loud the Force was around him; it would remind her of Anakin, but Anakin only ever happened to be loud, Anakin couldn’t help being a screeching klaxon in the flow of the Force. The Sith had to be doing it intentionally, to throw her off, as a measure of posturing, a blatant display of power. Ahsoka hated that it was starting to work against her.

“You underestimate him,” the Sith said, suddenly. “Know that there is no power, no light, in this galaxy that Darth Sidious cannot poison. There is no divine thing he cannot destroy. Everything is beneath him. He already has it all.”

“I’m assuming he’s behind the recent rise in Sith Lords, and involved with the Separatists,” Ahsoka said, pointedly. The Sith kept their numbers low intentionally. The one in front of her seemed like an unnecessary loop in an already closed unit.

The Force lashed out and the cavern shuddered. Ahsoka flinched and her arms flew over her head—she half-expected a cave-in—but through it all the Sith didn’t move an inch, and his death mask looked at her as dispassionately as it ever did. “You misunderstand me,” the vocoder practically snarled out. The words were staticky, at the edges. He was getting worked up. “You misunderstand him. You misunderstand this galaxy. He has you fooled. Darth Sidious is not involved with the Separatists, he _is_ the Separatists. He is not involved with the Republic, he _is_ the Republic. The galaxy stands idly by while Sidious takes it. Soon they will hand him his feast on a golden platter and then thank him.”

Ahsoka’s spine straightened. “Republic,” she said. Her heart was pounding. _He_ is _the Republic_ pulsed through the Force, but she could sense the truth of it, right there, embedded in the tangle that connected everything in the galaxy.

The Sith inclined his head. “Your war is a lie. The Separatists were manipulated into their position by Sidious and his agents until it would be impossible for the Republic to not act, and then Sidious threw the perfect army he’d strong-armed into existence ten years prior at it. He asked the Jedi Order to betray its own principles by leading his war and, as it were, your temple was made of glass. As everyone but you yourselves knew it would be.”

“You’re legitimately deranged,” Ahsoka snapped. “None of that is possible. You’re insane.”

“I have seen it,” the Sith said, solemnly.

Ahsoka shifted—the blaster wounds in her shoulder and on her side throbbed, as she did. “What sense would that make?Why would anyone—why play the long game—why go through the trouble of orchestrating a galactic war for, what? Power?”

The Sith was silent. “You know him not at all,” he said, and—as far as she could glean, between what emotion the vocoder offered her and the way the Force shifted and lulled—he was almost surprised.

“I don’t see how I’m supposed to know a Sith Lord that we’ve never caught,” Ahsoka said, crossly.

“You’ve met him.”

Ahsoka squinted at the mask. “I’d know a Sith Lord, I think. They’re known to wear black and some of them are too annoying to miss.”

The vocoder rattled. It might have been a laugh, or a snort, or just a glitch in the machine itself. “You never suspected Sheev Palpatine of treason against the Republic. You would have no idea, were I not here.”

_Palpatine,_ she thought, and desperately—desperately she tried to connect it, Sheev Palpatine, Chancellor of the Grand Republic, a desk jockey of average height and milky eyes and about as sly and grubby as any politician was. Nothing special to look at, notable for the title in front of his name. Sheev Palpatine, lauded everywhere by Republic nationalists for the steady hand he guided the galaxy with as it fought its civil war, who always called Anakin _my dear boy_ when they saw each other. _The wisest and greatest leader the Republic has ever had,_ Anakin would say, whenever he came up. _A good friend,_ too, though Ahsoka thought often that he saw Chancellor Palpatine as more of a father, and if Ahsoka wanted to throw stones at the tangled relationship between her former master and his own former master, she thought half the reason Obi-Wan directed so much distaste at the Chancellor was because of how much Anakin valued him. Sheev Palpatine was balding and scrawny and a few inches shorter than herself and when he walked it was even an unassuming amble. He looked nothing like the dragon of a Sith in front of her, whose every inch seemed armored and remade into something menacing, something blood-curdling, some kind of living weapon. The Sith in front of her could kill her in seven ways before she’d stand. Chancellor Palpatine had once offered her a hard candy with a watery little smile and patted her hand.

“It—that’s not possible,” she said, voice thready.

“I have no patience for your surprise,” he said. “You will believe me or you will not. Either way I will have my revenge. I want him lower than dead and I want to see his agony. I want him to know I am coming for him, and know that he cannot stop it.”

There was nothing empty about the way the Dark curled with delight at the thought of it; there was nothing empty about the way the Sith said it as if it were the only thing he’d ever wanted, the only thing that there could be to want. Death was a small word, for what Ahsoka thought the Sith wanted with Sidious—what he wanted was wrath, clean, simple, eye-for-an-eye wrath. Sidious dying was secondary to Sidious suffering.

“So why help me,” Ahsoka said, quietly. “If this is—if everything I did was a joke, if it was nothing, then why rescue me from the Seppies? I’m not a Jedi. I can’t do anything for you.”

The Sith regarded her. “Do you care so little for your life that you would remind an enemy of your uselessness, or do you have some bumbling point you wish to make.”  
  


Ahsoka stiffened. Her nerve endings burned, but she tried to ignore it. “You’d be a little self-pitying too, if you’d found out that there’s a chance everything you gave for years was for absolutely nothing—if you’d ever given anything up for any reason.”  
  


The vocoder crackled. “I have no idea,” he said, “how I am supposed to keep you alive, when you insist on offering the most inane commentary possible.”

Ahsoka turned away, swallowing hard—she was almost in too much pain, both from the hunger clawing at her stomach and the wounds, to think. Her hands were shaking and she fisted them.

“You are an opportunity,” the Sith said, finally. “My cause is not easy. Sidious will have immense defenses, and most difficult of all is his unnatural gift of foresight. He cannot be tricked—that is his game. I cannot out maneuver him. But as a duelist, he has many shortcomings where I do not. Under… optimal circumstances, I can defeat him. I cannot defeat him after running his gauntlet.”

“And you want me to run that gauntlet for you,” Ahsoka said. “You sure are cocky, I’ll give you that.”

The Sith raised a hand. “You would fail. I said that Sidious cannot be tricked. I did not say the same of the imbeciles he tends to employ. What is necessary is a diversion, of several kinds. Our element of surprise would be our advantage.”

“You said you want him to know you’re coming,” Ahsoka said.

“He will. He will see me coming from across the galaxy. He will be nonetheless surprised.”

_I want you to stop saying things that make the least amount of sense,_ Ahsoka thought. “What’s the catch?” she asked.

“Should I live through that battle,” he said, gravely, “you will take off my head and it will be done with.”  
  


Ahsoka jolted. “You—you want me to kill you, after you kill Sidious,” she said.

“Do you have a concussion, or are you otherwise hard of hearing,” the Sith said, thunderously.

Ahsoka gestured at him with her hand. “You have to get that not a lot of Sith Lords are looking to get decapitated by Jedi. This is ridiculous. This is completely and totally ridiculous. You have to understand that this is the weirdest conversation I’ve had in my life. There’s no way you’re not going to stab me in the back somewhere in that, how do I know you don’t just want Sidious’ position for yourself? This is insane, and you’re insane.”

The Sith clenched one hand into a fist, slowly, and then released it. It seemed to be what passed for anger management, to him. “You irritate me in fashions I did not think possible,” he said.

She cupped her face in her hands and scrubbed it, smearing around grit and sweat. “This is the longest day,” she said.

And for the first moment since they’d settled in the cavern, the Sith’s presence stilled, almost; the fire of it flattened, abated, charmed by some passing thought he’d had, or whatever it was that charmed Dark Lords of the Sith. Some of Tatooine’s warmth crawled forward again and she hadn’t realized she’d missed it, until it settled against her skin. The Sith reached up—jerkily, it seemed to be a motion the armor made difficult—and unhooked his massive cape, swung it off of his shoulders, balled it up into one hand and thrust it out to her almost petulantly. The mask was tilted away from her, like he was trying not to look at this unbearable gesture, like it would take the edge off of the fact that he’d dragged her across the desert at the point of his blade, repeatedly threatened to kill her for being annoying, and outlined a grandiose plan to kill his Sithly superior who happened to be the Chancellor of the Republic. Like it would take the edge off of the fact that if anything he said was true, everything she’d known her entire life, everything she’d fought for—everyone who had died, all of it was a farce.

“It will not be comfortable,” he said.

_Are you kidding me,_ she thought, and her hand grazed the fabric, hesitant. It would be rough, being armorweave, but it’d be something to stuff under her head, and gray was slipping into her vision, closer and closer. She needed to think, and she needed to be functional to think, and for now there was at least some kind of reassurance that the Sith wanted her alive, even if nothing he said and offered aligned with what she knew. But maybe she wasn’t as alone in the galaxy as she felt.

She took it, and nearly dropped it—she hadn’t anticipated how heavy the fabric would be, but considering it was wider than she was tall and half an inch thick, it had to be several pounds at the very least. He looked smaller without it, but unfortunately not by much; there was no way to make a presence like that less imposing, no matter how many ornaments were pulled off and rearranged.

“I guess if you decide to kill me in my sleep and leave the body here, there’s less dignified things after death than being a dragon’s chew toy,” she said, balling up the cape and pressing it against the wall.

The Sith didn’t acknowledge the statement. “There is a store of medical supplies kept beneath a market in Mos Espa. It is secret but I know how to access it. They will have bacta patches, so you do not collapse.”

Ahsoka laid back, and then, wonder of wonders, the Sith craned over the lamp contraption and turned it off. Ahsoka shifted and pulled the edge of the cape across her, because there was more than enough material for it to double as both a pillow and a blanket. “What’s your name?” she asked, suddenly.

“Does it matter,” the Sith said, derisively. “Names have little meaning to me.”

Ahsoka shrugged. “I want to know what they’d name the craziest, weirdest Dark Lord of the Sith they have.”

After a long breath, long enough that Ahsoka thought he likely wouldn’t answer, the Sith said, “Darth Vader,” in a short, clipped tone.

“That’s not bad. Not as bad as Tyrannus.”

Despite the general air of colluding to destroy the plots and machinations of a fellow Sith Lord, apparently Darth Vader drew the line at mocking Sith names—he stalked forward, his irritation rocking the waters of the Force, until he melted into the blackness near the mouth of the cavern. She only knew his back was turned to her because the flickering apparatus on his chest wasn’t visible, but she was glad he’d moved away, because the oppressive, regular noise of his breathing was fainter. Even if she wanted to get a closer look at the chest apparatus; he’d been managing to keep her attention off of it, so far.

By inches, Ahsoka moved her hand to her belt beneath the cape, and unhooked the commlink she’d been carrying for three months now. It was modified, something of an original design; _it won_ _’t find any channels, so it’s untraceable,_ he’d said. _It_ _’s only hooked to the one I have. It only does one thing._

_And what_ _’s that,_ she’d asked, though she’d already known. He’d looked apologetic even as he handed it to her.

_Emergency signal,_ he’d said, softly. _Press the button, and I_ _’ll get the alert, no matter how far apart we are. Don’t be stubborn, Snips. If you ever need anything, I can find you._

It wasn’t stubbornness that kept her away from pushing the button; it was the knowledge that the second Anakin got that signal, he’d abandon any campaign, any mission, because he was single-minded to the point of obsession. He’d find her across the galaxy. But Anakin was integral to the war; he and Obi-Wan, between the two of them, had won more battles and cracked more Separatist lines than the rest of the generals combined. The galaxy couldn’t afford for Ahsoka to pull away one of its most zealous defenders, not when the front lines had reached a fever pitch of fury.

But Ahsoka supposed the appearance of a new Sith Lord intent on assassinating the Chancellor of the Republic might warrant an emergency.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Really genuinely just wanted to write the last part where I tell you that Ahsoka, abducted by Anakin, calls Anakin to help her with the Anakin who abducted her. That was the entire punchline behind writing this. 9k to reach one barely funny punchline is a lot but it's clearly still a doable thing for me.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm going to be honest I probably don't remember enough of TCW to write this fic, but I don't really care, it's Star Wars fanfiction on the Internet, I just want to have a little fun. I'll post the other part soon! And then we'll see how it goes.


End file.
